PREFACE. XXXI 



was made King s Serjeant, and Bacon became Solicitor General 

 in his stead on the 25th of June, 1607. 



He had now no longer to fear that want would either steal 

 upon him as a wayfaring man or assault him as an armed man, 

 and in the greater tranquillity of mind which resulted he gave 

 himself up to the developement of his plan for enlarging the 

 borders of human knowledge. The Great Instauration seems 

 now to have taken a definite form, and as a means of clearing 

 the way for its reception he wrote the treatise called Cogitata 

 et Visa, which must have been the product of the latter half 

 of the year 1607. His professional work of the same period 

 is represented by A view of the differences in question 

 betwixt the King s Bench and the Council in the Marches, 

 and by two proclamations, the one touching the Marches, the 

 other concerning Jurors. 



The next year (1608) is marked by the falling in of the 

 clerkship of the Star-Chamber, by the death of William Mill 

 on the 1 6th of July. Bacon had waited patiently for it nearly 

 twenty years. In the summer vacation, and possibly during 

 the unwilling leisure caused by an outbreak of the plague, he 

 wrote his treatise Infehcem memorlam Elizabethae, and towards 

 the end of the year his discourse on the Plantation in Ireland, 

 which will even now be read with interest. Letters to his 

 friend Toby Matthew show that during the following year 

 (1609) the Instauration was not laid aside. My Instauration 

 I reserve for our conference ; it sleeps not. He sent him a 

 leaf or two of the Preface, carrying some figure of the whole 

 work. Shortly after he forwarded another portion, which 

 may have been the Redargulio Philosophiarum. In the course 

 of this year, also, he wrote and submitted to the judgement of 

 the same friend, a little work of his recreation, as he calls it, 

 the treatise De Sapientia Veterum^ on the interpretation of the 

 ancient fables of Greece and Rome. The Cogitata et Visa had 

 undergone revision and elaboration at the same time, and a 

 copy was sent in MS. to Bishop Andre wes, who had been 

 translated from Ghichester to Ely. 



The session of 1609-10 was occupied with disputes between 



